The most notable medical findings of 2016: Medical research has provided a respite from the media conversation in the annus horribilis 2016, Jerome Groopman writes in The New Yorker. Groopman says research was a “chance to challenge the assumptions and biases of medical science and public health not with bluster and noise but with rigorous experimentation,” and picked what he believes were the most notable medical findings of the year. One is the exculpation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic’s patient zero, who was presumed to be Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas and have been wrongly and unfairly vilified since. Researchers found that HIV actually entered the US through “New York City from the Caribbean in the nineteen-seventies, a decade before Dugas entered our country… This serves as a cautionary tale for medical professionals, journalists, and laypeople alike to resist clinical indictments based on hearsay, if not outright imagination.” Another breakthrough, Groopman writes, is dispelling the folk notion that cranberry juice is an effective treatment to urinary tract infection.

More important was a rethinking of how to treat prostate cancer. A study had shown that there was no difference in survival rates between patients who received surgery, those who had received radiation therapy, and those whose disease had been carefully monitored without intervention. The research also showed that the risk of metastases was three times more likely to occur in those being monitored than in those who received surgery or radiation, which drove oncologist Anthony D’Amico to recommend “that men who wish to avoid metastases should consider monitoring, rather than surgery or radiation, only if their life expectancy is less than a decade. Also on Groopman’s list is the discovery that “in spine surgery, it seems, less may not be more, but it can be equivalent,” with results from a Swedish study showing that patients who underwent a laminectomy alone functioned equally well after two years compared to those who had received the surgery plus a spinal fusion.

Groopman also wrote about the results of analysis of gun reform in Australia that followed the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The results showed that restrictive gun laws and an effective buyback programme brought down mass shootings to zero and resulted in a two-thirds decline in the overall rate of firearm deaths. This made us automatically think about the best deconstruction of the (to the rest of the world fairly odd) obsession with gun culture in the US by Australian stand up comedian Jim Jefferies, who hilariously explains “there’s one argument, and one argument alone, for having a gun and this is the argument:‘F— off, I like guns,’ it’s not the best argument, but it’s all you’ve got” (warning: profanity, lots of it; runtime 07:47, part two 07:52).